


in my blood like holy wine

by bloodiedknees



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, minnesota gothic bc why not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 13:08:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19888339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodiedknees/pseuds/bloodiedknees
Summary: Sam and Bucky meet the Thing that goes bump in the night.





	in my blood like holy wine

_**Welcome to Salvation, Minnesota. Population 1,034. Are you ready for Judgement Day?** _

Salvation is quiet when they roll into town proper just shy of midnight. Houses are dark and storefronts are shuttered; everything rests in a state of ghostly abandonment. A crow screams from somewhere deep in the forest, a reminder that something else is alive out there, not just them.

The main road is void of streetlamps, forcing their headlights to illuminate the night and narrow the world into the hundred feet in front of their bumper. Everything else is smudged in shades of black. Sam slows the car to a crawl, his hands white-knuckled on the wheel; two city boys weren’t meant for this kind of dead of the night driving in the middle of nowhere. Bucky peers out the window, searching for a sign indicating the direction of the motel they’d looked up back in Duluth. They had lost reasonable cell service after Two Harbors, and judging by the gas station map Sam had bought, Salvation is over an hour drive from any other major town. So they’re screwed, to put it mildly.

Houses and storefronts begin to thin out. Pitch black forest eats more and more of the passenger window, and Bucky gets the idea that they’ve just passed through the entirety of Salvation in under five minutes.

“We gotta turn back,” Bucky says, breaking the silence.

“What? Why?”

“There’s nothing out here. Motel isn’t gonna be this far away from the center of town.”

Sam sighs, taking one hand off the wheel to rub his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. You’re probably right.”

Bucky can see that exhaustion is fraying Sam at the edges. They haven’t stopped since Des Moines and they haven’t slept since Illinois, which was two days ago. “I can drive, if you need a break.”

Sam glares at him, “Not a chance, Barnes. Not after what you did to my last car.”

“That was over ten years ago, Sam. Statute of limitations, right?”

“I have a long memory when it comes to the totaling of my beloved, Donna.”

Bucky laughs softly, leaning back against the headrest. “Donna?”

“What, a man can’t appreciate Donna Summer?”

“Thought you liked Marvin Gaye.”

“I’m a man of many interests, don’t try to put me in a box, Barnes.”

Sam is grinning at him when he looks over, and something flips in Bucky’s stomach. He’s still getting used to having the full force of Sam Wilson charm directed at him every so often. Even in the dark, he can see the crinkle around Sam’s eyes and the gap in his teeth, and Bucky feels heat rise in his cheeks. He breaks eye contact to stare out the passenger window.

“I’ll pull a U-turn and head back to town,” Sam says. “We’ll find it.”

Bucky makes a noise of acknowledgment, his eyes fixed on the stars peeking out above the treetops. He hasn’t seen stars like that since he was in the war, they never could see them in Brooklyn even though he and Steve tried. That was a long time ago. A different Bucky climbed the rooftop of his apartment to point out constellations to Steve and weave the stories that got them canonized into the night sky; this Bucky can still remember most of the names but the stories are muddled: _Orion, Cassiopeia, Delphinus, Ursa major_. He turns his back to the stars, he doesn’t want to think about Steve, not anymore.

The silence in the car is comforting and Bucky can feel his eyes beginning to close when something sprints out onto the road in front of them. It is massive and pitch black, and seems to consume every ounce of light pouring from their high beams. Sam swears and slams on the breaks, sending the car skidding on the loosely packed gravel road. Bucky hisses through his teeth as he braces himself against the dashboard, the seatbelt tearing into the meat of his chest. The car comes to a shuddering stop, barely missing contact with the Thing. It stumbles away from their bumper and collapses in the road.

“Holy fuck.” Sam breathes, his forehead dropping against the steering wheel. “Holy fuck, what was that?”

Bucky doesn’t answer, too preoccupied with trying to decipher something recognizable about the Thing. He can’t quite get a handle on any aspect of its body, his eyes skip over its outline at a jarring pace and his brain instantly seems to forget what he’s seen. He clenches his teeth in annoyance.

“Bucky?”

He leans forward in his seat. There’s an itch at the back of his brain telling him if only he could get closer, he’d know what it was, he’d recognize it, he’d understand.

“Bucky, man, did you hear me? What the fuck are we gonna do?”

Sam places a hand on his shoulder, his voice swirling through the emptiness in the car. Bucky blinks, and the tendril stretching between him and the Thing breaks. He turns, focusing in on Sam.

He is wide-eyed and shaky, and Bucky can feel the panic pouring off him. The atmosphere in the car is palpable; a flesh and blood being with a heartbeat loud enough to cover their own shallow breathing.

“What are we gonna do?” Sam repeats.

Bucky swallows back his own rising sense of dread. He opens his mouth to reply when movement out of the corner of his eye draws his attention. The Thing is shifting against the road; legs or arms or whatever appendages they are scrape deep tracks into the gravel, trying to gain purchase.

“It’s moving… it’s _moving_.” The words feel thick on his tongue, and before he knows what he’s doing he opens the car door.

“Bucky, don’t you dare,” Sam whispers. His hand darts out, trying to catch the edge of Bucky’s hoodie.

Bucky ignores him. He slips from the passenger seat, his boots crunching lightly on the gravel. Without the protection of the car, Bucky feels naked, and the idiocy of his decision to leave relative safety suddenly blindsides him. He thinks about getting back in and telling Sam to drive in the opposite direction like a bat out of hell when he hears the driver door open. Bucky looks over the hood and locks eyes with Sam, who pointedly drags a finger across his own throat. Bucky half-heartedly flips him off.

The night tastes like ozone. Bucky barely breathes as he steps into the glow of the headlights. He moves closer and his feet feel heavy like he’s wading through deep water. No other sounds come from the forest; the night is punctuated only by his footsteps. The vacancy of noise gnaws at him. They are utterly alone, and somehow that’s more terrifying than whatever is in the road before them.

The Thing is writhing against the ground when Bucky reaches its side; appendages are outstretched and desperately scarring the earth. It’s pitiful. Bucky gets the sudden urge to help the Thing, to touch it, to comfort it and somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he knows that he shouldn’t. The fear of the Thing should be primal and ancient, but fear was taken from him a lifetime ago.

Bile rises in his throat as he kneels down. The Thing reeks of decay and wet earth. Even up close, he can’t distinguish anything about it; the Thing is an expanse of luminescent flesh, turned a muddy reddish-brown by their high beams, and it radiates enough heat to make sweat bead at the back of Bucky’s neck. He feels caught, he feels claustrophobic.

From somewhere over his shoulder, he hears Sam say his name but it’s distant and watery - Sam is not in this world or Bucky is not in his, wherever he is, the Thing is his only present and it consumes him. Bucky scoots forward, the gravel biting into his skin, and he knows there’ll be bruises tomorrow. The Thing is getting weaker: now that he’s closer, he can feel the life ebbing out with every desperate movement. Bucky aches with it. He doesn’t want this Thing to suffer alone in death, so when he instinctively reaches over to put his hand squarely on its fleshy side, Bucky doesn’t even blink.

Instantly, he falls elbow deep, his palm making contact with the gravel underneath. Bucky huffs in surprise. _Christ, I wouldn’t have expected that_. The Thing shifts around his arm and he wonders if that sensation is it breathing. The tidal wave of fear calms for a moment; it’s just him and the Thing, and the eerie vibrations coursing up his arm. Time stretches on and on between them.

Then one of the appendages snaps up from the road.

It twists around his free arm, the metal one. If the flesh his right arm is encased in is soft, then these appendages are decidedly less so. They are rough and hot, and Bucky flinches at the contact. Another appendage grabs at him and another, and another, until his arm is a mass of seething flesh. The Thing tightens its grip, and the sensors in his arm begin to whine under the stress. He feels something pop, like the Thing is trying to rip his arm right from his shoulder.

Bucky tries to pull away but finds he can barely move. The appendages tighten more. He takes deep, slow breaths through his mouth, trying to manage the panic like Sam taught him months ago. Bucky had laughed about it then, all cocksure that he’d never actually use it - _Didn’t have breathing exercises in World War II, Sammy. Didn’t have them in HYDRA either and look at me now, I’m a paragon of mental health_. - but damn if he isn’t glad Sam made him do it, at least once. But breathing exercises can only do so much and they sure can’t get him out of his current predicament, and Bucky can sense the strength of the vibranium wavering.

Bucky pulls away again, harder this time; a desperate pull against strength that far outweighs his own. Evidently, the Thing doesn’t appreciate Bucky struggling because his elbow is efficiently snapped out of the socket. He clenches his teeth hard, his sensors really going haywire now. It’s unbearable and insistent, and there is nothing else. Bucky thinks it can’t possibly get worse than his flesh and blood arm, still, elbow-deep in the Thing, starts on fire.

 _This hurts_ , he thinks absently. _I should probably scream now_.

Bucky opens his jaw and screams. He feels a thousand miles away from himself.

 _Dissociating, that’s what Sam calls it. I’m dissociating, right?_ He hovers on the edge of blacking out. The pain is bubbling through his very skin; it’s in his veins, in his muscles, in his bones. HYDRA knew how to administer pain better than anyone he’s ever known but this Thing could really give them a run for their money. He thinks he laughs at that thought. He thinks there’s blood pooling in his mouth.

 _Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, this is where I die_.

Metal scrapes against gravel. The hold on his metal arm loosens. Another screech of metal and it falls away altogether. The arm feels weightless, he tries to flex the numbness from his fingers and nothing moves. _Something must be broken. Didn’t something break?_ He discards the thought when the pain in his flesh and bone arm increases, enough that he bites down on his tongue in shock.

The metallic screech comes again, closer this time; close enough that the aftershocks reverberate in his back teeth. Then it comes again, and again, until Bucky wants to scream: _Stop! You’re killing it! You’re killing me!_ Black dots swarm at the edges of his vision. He inhales, exhales and then it’s gone: the noise, the pain, the tightness around his arm. There’s nothing for the first time in so long and he can _be_ again.

He collapses on the road, cheek pressed roughly against the gravel. It's cool, Bucky finds it grounding and his eyes begin to drift close. He's bone-tired. He's been bone-tired for over 80 years and for the first time he thinks he may just rest a while, even if it's in the middle of the road in Bumfuck, Minnesota.

Bucky feels himself being lifted up, strong arms bracing his back and behind his knees. _Sammy_. He opens his eyes and sees the hazy outline of Sam’s jaw, his nose, his eyelashes illuminated by the headlights; he looks like an angel, lovingly torn from a Renaissance painting. Bucky sighs and leans into the crook of Sam’s neck.

“I hate you, like so much,” Sam says, his breath stirring the hair on his forehead.

“I know.” Bucky squeezes his eyes shut. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> sam and bucky, road trip, and midwestern gothic: an intersection of all my interests. good luck with the minnesota references. thank you jules for everything always.


End file.
